The term "idiocracy" means a nation run by idiots - and the term idiot is defined as "an utterly foolish or senseless person" and/or a "person of the lowest order in a former classification of mental retardation, having a mental age of less than three years old." There are many reasons to conclude that America has become a full-fledged Idiocracy - bad decisions after bad decisions after bad decisions really have suggested that the last decade has seen the ascension of utterly foolish, senseless people of the lowest order in a former classification of mental retardation.
And yet, as I show in my newspaper column out today, if there was still any shred of doubt that we had avoided becoming an Idiocracy, it was only fully snuffed out in the last week by David Broder and Jackson Diehl - two of the alleged "deans" of the Washington media intelligentsia.
Here is Broder attacking President Obama for taking the time to carefully consider whether to send an additional 40,000 American troops into an increasingly Vietnam-like Afghanistan quagmire:
The more President Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees...The urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right.
Let's set aside the nauseating spectacle of two crotchety old men, comfortably protected in their plush Washington offices demanding a president send 40,000 troops potentially to their deaths without regard for whether that's the right decision. Let's just put that grotesque immorality in the corner, and pretend it's not important - and let's go to the deeper message of aggressive pro-idiocy.
Broder and Diehl are paid think carefully about issues and then offer their opinions on those issues. That's not part of what they're supposed to do - it's what they do. It's the way they make a living, it's what they're supposed to derive their credibility from - indeed, it's their entire raison d'etre.
And yet, these supposed leading lights of the intelligentsia, these professional thinkers, are overtly preaching anti-intelligence. They are quite clearly insisting that the proper course of action for a president is to avoid applying intelligence and avoid thinking at all. And both of them aren't even being subtle about it.
Read my column here for my take on exactly what all this means - and why it is so deeply disturbing.
The column relies on grassroots support -- and because of that support, it is getting wider and wider circulation (a big thank you to all who have helped with that). So if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn't be what it is without your h
This is a big deal for 2 clear reasons. First, Colbert's piece reaches a broad audience of both political junkies and less political Comedy Central viewers - and his cut-to-the-bone presentation of the seemingly esoteric issues of trade and globalization is reaching both those audiences via this segment. Second, his amplification of this particular story reiterates OpenLeft's (and the larger blogosphere's) integration into the broader mediasphere. It is proof that the work we're doing here isn't being done in a vacuum.
So, as I said last week, I hope when you consider contributing to OpenLeft's grassroots fundraiser, you look at how we got the ball rolling on this key issue as just one example of why our work here matters. I think it's fair to say that because of our work covering and promoting this issue, and because that work became a part of the larger media discussion, there's a better chance than American law won't be changed to effectively legalize products made with child, slave and convict labor. That's a real accomplishment.
It's easy to write-off batshit crazy narcissists like Dick Armey and Sarah Palin as what they are: Batshit crazy narcissists. But as Wellstone Action's Jeff Blodgett reminds us in this blog post, Armey/Palin-ism does represent something real and potentially powerful, even if it is insane.
Blodgett is a former aide and campaign manager for Paul Wellstone, so he knows a little bit about progressive movement building and the double-edged sword that is populism. Here's what he sees:
ECONOMIC CONSERVATIVES ARE IN ASCENDANCE -- growing in influence and setting strategy for the right. The social religious wing, dominant in the Bush administration, has become less effective and relevant. Their message is angry, populist, and economic: FreedomWorks' slogan is: Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom. Government takeover is their bogeyman. In 2010, they will focus on exploiting the economic pain in the country, railing against spending and taxes, and blaming all government and certain incumbents.
CONSERVATIVES ARE BORROWING FROM THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT. The NYT article quotes FreedomWorks staff saying that they are making close study of Saul Alinsky and other community organizers. Like progressives, the other side is increasing conservative candidate development (NY-23 and in GOP primaries all over the country), and improving their grassroots advocacy skills (like the impression made at August town halls).
THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT CONTINUES TO BE BETTER FUNDED. FreedomWorks, just one of many groups, easily raised $7 million from donors in 2008, including single gifts of $1 million and $750,000. The Leadership Institute, the premier training center for the right, sustains an $8 million dollar annual budget--at least twice the budget of any of comparable groups (like Wellstone Action) on the progressive side. Americans for Prosperity, another key conservative economic group has 73 staff people nationally and in 20 states.
In the short term, of course, this frothing movement may temporarily self-destruct by virtue of being publicly represented by incoherent and politically unpalatable freaks like Armey and Palin. But in the long term, it's scary stuff, because it represents one expression of authentic anger in the country at large.
As I wrote in my book, The Uprising, populism is value neutral - there's conservative populism and there's progressive populism; there's productive populism and there's destructive populism. And so a battle is on right now between the Right and Left to offer an enraged America a populist way to channel its justifiable anger.
Progressives can win this fight - but we face some disadvantages, not the least of which is that a cautious and sometimes corrupt Democratic Party has become the Washington Establishment via its overwhelming wins in 2006 and 2008. That means it becomes harder to harness anti-establishment fervor in a backlash election climate.
It doesn't, however, mean we cannot defeat the Armey/Palin phenomenon. On almost every issue, the right is way out of step with America. In that sense, our charge is simply delivering on the progressive promises we've been making, while their charge is the much more difficult task of convincing/misleading America into supporting positions the country doesn't already support.
That's why those who berate progressive pressure against Obama and Democrats are so wrong in their outlook. If we don't mount that pressure and Democrats therefore do not deliver, we will help build the Armey/Palin movement into something even more dangerous.
This is what happens to Democrats - even from red states like Montana - when they overtly and publicly shill for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries:
U.S. Sen. Max Baucus' approval rating dropped significantly this year over two years ago in a Montana State University Billings poll released Monday.
Just 44 percent of those polled approved of the job that the Montana Democrat is doing. Forty percent disapproved of the Montana Democrat's job performance.
That's a big difference from 2007, when more than 64 percent approved of his job performance.
To know how devastating this 20-point drop is, consider that the Associated Press notes that "approval ratings for U.S. Sen. on Tester, U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg and Gov. Brian Schweitzer did not change markedly in the poll." Put another way, even though the MSU-Billings poll can sometimes be unreliable, this drop for Baucus isn't part of some overall wave nor within any mathematical margin of error - Baucus took an explicit and explicitly big hit.
This was pretty predictable. Baucus didn't really make much of an effort to even pretend he was something other than a health insurance/pharmaceutical industry shill. And voters caught on.
In its typical - and typically desperate - attempt to sensationalize everything via fearmongering, most of the Serious Media continues to assess the Ft. Hood tragedy through the prism of international terrorism rather than through the lens of a stretched-to-the-bone military. And so we arrive at a truly telling moment in the American Idiocracy, whereby a heavy metal rockstar like Henry Rollins makes far more sense of reality than most of those in the media and political Establishment who are paid to make sense of reality:
Writing off the actions of Major Hasan as an act of terrorism avoids having to deal with some very big problems and answering some very hard and important questions. Hopefully, a thorough investigation into Hasan will be conducted with the greatest care and capacity. Such an investigation is anathema to some politicians and many pundits, as it may uncover too much awful truth involving things like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the effects on a human being of professionally listening to men and women detail unimaginable horror and atrocity for several hours a day, year after year. Such an investigation might bring up the fact that prolonged wars like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan produce many casualties, often in unlikely places. And it might have to account for the upward spike in suicides in the American military, or even the suicide rate at Fort Hood. (There have been at least 75 soldier suicides since the Afghanistan war began, in 2001.)
When I hear someone attach the word "terrorist" to the actions of Nidal Hasan before the facts are in, I know they lack the fortitude to do the heavy lifting that a true assessment and investigation would require. I know they don't have what it takes to shoulder America's awesome responsibility to the men and women of the military as these two engagements drag on.
Don't want to deal with all this? Fine. Just don't say you "support the troops," because you are, in fact, leaving them to twist in the wind.
Rollins point is basic commonsense...which, of course, is why his point has been all but ignored. The American Idiocracy rewards hysteria, and particularly the kind of reductionist and bigoted hysteria exemplified by the effort to turn the Ft. Hood tragedy into a simple "America versus Islam" crusade. We want simple soundbyte answers to everything - even if, as Rollins shows, the tragedy is more likely the result of many different non-soundbyteable factors.
Of course, Rollins' analysis is not just complex - it also touches on the taboo when he references a military over-stressed by multiple deployments. Looking at that means looking at our adventurist foreign policy and, really, our entire culture's militaristic posture - and that's simply not allowed in the Idiocracy.
Instead, conservative leaders cite the Ft. Hood tragedy not as proof that there are individual crazy extremists of all stripes in America, nor as proof that the military is overstressed - but only as proof that anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world supposedly means "now is the time for a professional and legal backlash against the Muslim community" and that we therefore must further stretch our military by escalating wars in the heart of the Muslim world.
Forget that this course of action might not only further stretch the military but also further enflame the global anti-Americanism conservatives rail against - the only goal is to stir up religious/ethnic hatred, stay the neoconservative course in foreign policy, and rejustify the policies that have America value militarism over every other priority.
In pitting the 10-year cost of Democrats' health care bill against the 10-year projected cost of the bloated Pentagon budget, my newspaper column last week made a simple comparison rarely ever made in politics today - a comparison that might provide citizens with much needed context, but a comparison that is ignored.
Is the comparison's omission deliberate? It's hard to say, but when you read this typical New York Times piece, it's hard to argue that it isn't being irresponsibly ignored:
While President Obama's decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan is primarily a military one, it also has substantial budget implications that are adding pressure to limit the commitment, senior administration officials say...
Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant.
So even if Mr. Obama opts for a lower troop commitment, Afghanistan's new costs could wash out the projected $26 billion expected to be saved in 2010 from withdrawing troops from Iraq. And the overall military budget could rise to as much as $734 billion, or 10 percent more than the peak of $667 billion under the Bush administration.
Kudos, of course, to the Times for even reporting on the unfathomably large costs of intensifying militarism and adventurism. But as you'll see in the story, there's no attempt to put the costs into any context - specifically, there's no mention that an escalation in Afghanistan would mean outlays for the one-year Pentagon budget is approaching the total outlays of the entire 10-year health care bill.
Of course, the Times does offer up one fleeting contextual message indicating that increased defense spending from an Afghanistan escalation "would be a politically volatile issue for Mr. Obama at a time when the government budget deficit is soaring, the economy is weak and he is trying to pass a costly health care plan." But even that brief mention is dishonest.
On what basis does the Times call the health care plan "costly?" As I said in my column, while the Congressional Budget Office (ie. the nonpartisan institution that reporters/politicians use to price bills - the nonpartisan institution that congressional Republicans tout as an authority) says the health legislation would mandate about $890 billion, CBO also makes painfully clear its tax and budget-cutting provisions would recover a net of $109 billion over 10 years, meaning the bill is as "costly" to the public treasury as the purchase of a stock that produces a net 10% return on investment. I mean, seriously - if you invested $1,000 into a stock and got $1,100 back, would you lament to a friend about how "costly" the investment was to your bank account? No - because your friend would look at you like you were insane.
Indeed, only in Washington is a big return on taxpayer investment and a $109 billion reduction in the deficit an example of something that's "costly" to taxpayers - and only in a quickly deteriorating American media would defense spending be reported with almost zero context.
I think it's absolutely idiotic for White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to float the idea of massive social spending cuts right now. If the Great Depression taught us anything, it is that slashing spending in the name of deficit reduction is a great way to exacerbate a bad economic situation. While Democrats may fear being tarred with the "tax and spend" label, they should fear even more being tarred with the charge that they aim to "Recreate '38."
That said, if we're going to have a debate over spending and deficits, let's at least have a debate about the real numbers. And as I point out in my new newspaper column out today, those numbers are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation.
The column relies on grassroots support -- and because of that support, it is getting wider and wider circulation (a big thank you to all who have helped with that). So if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn't be what it is without your help.
As we continue our grassroots fundraiser for OpenLeft this week, I just wanted to offer up an example for folks to see how far we've come here in our work - and what we've been able to build together.
If you are reading this blog post, it's a good bet you have a pretty good idea of what we do here at OpenLeft. However, I wanted to point you to this clip from Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show this week just to give you a sense of how the work on this site has become an important part of the burgeoning progressive media in America.
As you'll see, Maddow explicitly cites and credits research from OpenLeft in opening up a discussion about trade policy, economics and corruption. This piece was not specially sent to her by any of us - she (or her producers) found it simply by reading this site, suggesting that she and many others in the mediasphere are reading this site regularly. In that way, I think her clip is a pretty good example of how - on a very lean budget - OpenLeft has really been able to make a bigger and bigger impact not just in grassroots politics, but also in the biggest of Big Media.
I was honored to give the keynote speech to the Democratic Party of Denver's annual Edward M. Kennedy Dinner this weekend. It was a sold-out affair, and I took the opportunity to both honor the senator who this dinner is named after, and suggest some principles for Democrats to embrace as we move into arguably the most important political moment in our lifetimes. It also included a key reference to one of the greatest television shows ever made: Mad Men.
One of the few - and I sincerely stress the word "few" - concrete legislative successes progressives notched in the Republican Congress under President George W. Bush came on the evening of July 26th, 2002, when they humiliated the House into passing a bill sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) banning federal contracts from going to companies that engage in tax "inversions." These are the schemes whereby a corporation that is based in the United States buy a P.O. box in Bermuda and use it to legally avoid paying American taxes.
The bill, reported Congressional Quarterly at the time, "was expected to fail [but] when the 15-minute voting clock ran out, DeLauro's amendment was five votes ahead." Ultimately, industry-owned Republican legislators who had tried to vote down the measure realized they weren't going to be able to stop it, and "after a nod from Republican leadership, more than 100 Republicans recast their votes to give DeLauro an avalanche victory." Having witnessed this firsthand on the floor of the House, I can tell you it was indeed a sight to see.
And yet in the now-Democratic Congress seven years later, with deficits exploding and the government clearly needing to strengthen any and all incentives for corporations to pay their taxes, I was more than disheartened to read this story in the Hill newspaper this week:
Multinational corporations are fighting to preserve language in a spending bill that would weaken a ban on federal contracts.
The provision, inserted in the Senate version of the bill at the request of the Obama administration, would weaken a ban on federal contracts for inverted companies...
Before the ban began in 2002, four of the 100 largest federal contractors were inverted, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
In 2001, those four companies received $2.7 billion in federal contracts, but they have unable to win the contracts since the ban was put into place.
The Obama administration is justifying its push on the grounds that the ban may - at some point in the undetermined future - conflict with our trade agreements. It's a charge North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan (D) rightly calls "absurd."
What this is all about is corporate lobbying against provisions that both use taxpayer money to reward domestic companies that pay their fair share of taxes and disincentivize companies from trying to rip off the public through offshore "inversions." And it's one of the first examples we've seen of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress potentially doing something even worse than the Bush administration and the Republican Congress.
Here we have a commonsense progressive tax measure that Democrats managed to pass and then expand under Bush and the GOP, and here we are less than a year into an era of full Democratic control of Washington watching Democrats aiming to weaken that tax measure. When you look at this move and remember that candidate Barack Obama himself promised to strengthen - not weaken - laws cracking down on offshore tax rip-off schemes, you wonder why we even waged that tough progressive fight back in 2002.
You wonder, in short, whether you are getting sold down the river.
We've seen corporations use "free trade" agreements to quietly camouflage their push for exploitable labor in broader arguments about globalization. What we haven't seen is corporate special interests openly push for U.S. regulators to openly allow companies to sell goods made with child and slave labor...until now.
Check out this report from Inside U.S. Trade (no link- subscription required) - it's straight from the I Shit You Not File:
Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA)...
These groups are examining the ramifications of the bill's provisions, especially in light of the bill's requirements that a newly created office in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) annually report to Congress on the volume and value of goods made with child labor, forced labor or convict labor that have been stopped at the border.
Business sources say this reporting requirement could cause DHS to more actively seek out imported products made with child labor, forced labor or convict labor...
One source did expect a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance Committee markup of the bill, and speculated that U.S. industry groups and foreign governments could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message.
Those of us pushing for serious trade policy reform have argued for years that businesses are aiming to create global economic policies that allow them to troll the world for the most exploitable forms of labor. As General Electric CEO Jack Welch famously said, corporations want laws that allow them to "have every plant you own on a barge" - one that can move from country to country looking for the worst conditions to exploit. Such an international economic regime would (and now does) allow the world's worst governments to create artificial comparative economic advantages through bad/immoral policies.
This is an important concept: Whereas comparative advantage used to be about natural advantages (ie. one country has optimal soil for grapes, another country has optimal soil for corn), "free trade" encourages countries to create comparative advantage through man-made laws. Some countries, for instance, creates a comparative advantage by letting factories pollute as much as they want, thus encouraging companies to move their factories there from other countries where pollution controls are more serious. Other countries create a comparative advantage by permitting children to be enslaved, thus encouraging companies operating in countries with more expensive non-slave labor to shift operations to a place where they can make products with all but free labor.
I appeared on PBS Now on Friday for a 20-minute one-on-one discussion about the 2009 election and President Obama's first year in office. You can watch the interview here.
My basic point was pretty simple: If there was a message from the 2009 election, it is that Americans are really pissed off - as they should be when collusion between Washington and Wall Street result in an economic meltdown with unemployment at Great Depression levels.
Democrats can react to that anger by either halting the progressive agenda or they can follow through on all the progressive promises they made during the 2006 and 2008 election. Republicans, as President Obama now acknowledges, will attack them no matter what they do - so IMHO, the smartest policy and political move is for them to push the progressive agenda as aggressively as possible.
I write a lot about the importance of fair trade - specifically, about the significance of making sure our international economic laws do not encourage job outsourcing, labor abuse, environmental degradation and other bad behavior. Often times, these trade issues seem esoteric, abstract, and caught in their a silo that only, say, union workers care about.
But nothing could be further from the truth, as my new newspaper column today shows. Because our economy and environment is so globalized (the former because of technology, the latter because, well, we all live on one planet), trade issues tend to touch everything. They touch health care through the drug importation debate, they touch jobs through the outsourcing debate, they touch financial reform through international regulatory debates, and they touch global warming. Indeed, that last debate over climate change legislation is probably the best example of an bill that at first glance seems totally unrelated to trade, and yet could be rendered almost completely meaningless if it doesn't include real trade reform.
Brown wants the Senate to consider imposing tariffs on foreign competitors operating in countries with lax rules for greenhouse gas emissions.
"Carbon dioxide emissions expand if a company closes down in Toledo, Ohio, and moves to Shanghai, where the emissions standards are weaker," he said. Brown describes this phenomenon as "carbon leakage."
I could reiterate what Brown said with an "in other words" paragraph, but I don't even have to. What he's saying makes perfect sense when you take more than five seconds to think past the idiocy of the Punditburo's creation of false choices between supposedly Enlightened Free Trade and allegedly Luddite Protectionism.
It's the same thing for so many issues. We can reform our own domestic laws all we want - but on so many priorities, if those reforms are not accompanied by trade policy changes, then we aren't making the kinds of strides we need to make. We can have stimulus bills that seem great, but whose resources are unduly spent sending jobs overseas because its Buy America provisions have been gutted. We can have a health care bill that breaks the bank because it doesn't reform the laws that prevent Americans from buying lower-priced prescription drugs. We can have a climate bill that is touted as major progress, but because it is stripped of trade reform, it effectively encourages companies to head overseas and subsequently emit more greenhouse gas than they were when they were here.
You get the point: We ignore the fair trade cause at our peril.
The column relies on grassroots support -- and because of that support, it is getting wider and wider circulation (a big thank you to all who have helped with that). So if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn't be what it is without your help.
What about the millions of Americans, I asked, who have insurance but find that the rising premiums and deductibles are eating away at any financial gains they might otherwise make? "The largest empirical problem we have in health care today is too many people are too overinsured," he said.
That's right - the face of the Tea Party "movement" is on record now saying that the major problem in the American health care system is that too many people have too much health insurance.
To feed the Punditburo's appetite for fact-free speculation and polemic, the Beltway press and the political activist class often manufactures elaborate rationales for fairly simple events. These professional prognosticators refuse to accept obvious explanations, either because they feel the need to produce overdramatized entertainment or because the 24-7 news cycle they create requires them to guru-ize politicians and their minions so as to fill time. And so our political discourse teems with fantastical tales of super-secret pony plans and Rasputin-like geniuses brilliantly playing 57-dimensional chess.
The latest of these tales is that of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama. With Bloomberg barely hanging on in his bid to buy a third term, progressives are rightfully asking why Obama didn't more forcefully endorse this plutocrat's Democratic challenger, William Thompson, considering the fact that a more forceful Obama endorsement easily could have moved a decisive amount of votes to Thompson in the overwhelmingly Democratic city.
Attempting to answer this question, the New York Times gives us the standard hackneyed mythology about "a dramatic effort, unfolding behind the scenes" - a hagiography about supposedly super-sharp Bloomberg and his even more strategically masterful aides brilliantly creating (deceptively, as the election results now prove) an aura of inevitability and simultaneously cajoling a reluctantly compliant White House into keeping quiet.
Incredibly, left out of this labyrinthine mythmaking is an examination of a much more plausible reason for Obama's silence: Bloomberg's billions.
Here you have one of the richest people on the planet running for mayor in a city that is already safely in Democratic hands, in terms of presidential, congressional and New York state elections. This billionaire is desperate to retain his vanity platform as New York's public face.
Thus, what was most likely going on here was something pretty simple: The Democratic Party wanted to avoid antagonizing this billionaire for fear of retribution (ie. campaign contributions to the Republican Party, a vote-splitting third-party run for president, etc.) - and in fact, the Democratic Party probably aims to court this billionaire for future campaign contributions. And so the Obama White House via Rahm Emanuel (a guy who got his start as a big donor political fundraiser) kept the president quiet and hence appeased this billionaire in a race that doesn't matter a whole lot to the national Democratic Party (even as it matters a whole helluva lot to New York City voters).
Put another way, the Bloomberg campaign to silence Obama wasn't any act of tactical genius or some sort of "sophisticated strategy," as the New York Times insists. It was a basic financial transaction. His billions not only bought the election, but they effectively created a disincentive for national Democrats to try to beat him. If there was any "genius" at all, it was merely that Bloomberg is such an empty suit and such a narcissistic opportunist that he's been happy to flirt with any party willing to sell its soul to him, (and he's made sure not to take any positions that make it impossible for Democratic elites to even tacitly support). That flirting has preserved both the perception of a potential carrot and stick that ultimately backed off Obama - the potential carrot being future campaign contributions to Democrats, the potential stick being possible campaign contributions to Republicans/anti-Democratic initiatives.
But, then, being willing to align oneself with any party that serves one's short-term purpose isn't really "genius," now is it? Really, it's just a lack of scruples and core convictions. Mix that with billions of dollars, and you get exactly what happened yesterday: Plutocrat Republican-lite Mike Bloomberg winning reelection thanks, in part, to a Democratic president refusing to seriously back the Democratic candidate.
Indeed, it all goes back to the Power of Big Money. Sure, Obama and national Democrats fetishize "bipartisanship" and they've tried to cite their cordial relationship with Bloomberg as proof of their "bipartisan" credentials. And sure, Bloomberg isn't as odious a Republican as, say, Rudy Giuliani. But those were most likely secondary considerations in the Obama-Bloomberg detente in comparison to the influence of cold, hard cash. It's a simple explanation of that electorally decisive alliance - an explanation that may not be as sexy as glamorizing the "smarts" of Bloomberg, but it's almost surely the dynamic really at play.
I appeared on CNN American Morning yesterday to discuss today's highest profile elections. You can watch the segment here - I tried to make the point that while these elections are important, and while the Democratic Party certainly has its problems right now, these contests do a better job of illustrating severe Republican weakness than anything else right now.
Karl Rove and the Beltway Punditburo are busy trying to tell us all why the three big elections today - the Virginia gubernatorial, the New Jersey gubernatorial, and the New York special congressional election - are a referendum on President Obama and the progressive agenda, and a bellwether for future elections. While Chris is absolutely right in saying that the national Democratic Party clearly has some issues it needs to work through, the idea that these three races are big-time commentaries on progressivism itself is is just plain moronic - even for a Washington chattering class that is made up mostly of morons.
Over the last many years, I've gradually moved toward full vegetarianism to the point where there's only one meat-based foot I still semi-regularly consume - every few weeks, I have a bagel with whitefish salad on it (and I'm working on ending this last vestige of my meat eating). I tell you this with the disclaimer that I've never before broadcast my vegetarianism, and I am not comfortable preaching about it. In fact, I don't usually like talking about it at all, because the core reason I am a vegetarian is a reason that our macho culture portrays as the most unacceptably "weak" or "bleeding heart" of all. But it is a reason that is finding a powerful constituency at the ballot box.
In this country, vegetarians have often been looked at suspiciously no matter what motives they cite for their vegetarianism because eating meat has become fundamentally associated with patriotism itself. When politicians speak passionately, we say they are feeding "red meat" to audiences and when candidates campaign in the heartland their manliness is shown off as how big a slab of meat they can wolf down. Indeed, slaughtering live animals and eating their corpses has become so synonymous with American culture that the beef industry's entire marketing slogan is simply "It's what's for dinner."
Admittedly, in the last few years, it's become a bit more acceptable to be a vegetarian for either health-related or environmental reasons. As we've learned more about the negative health effects of a high-meat diet, our society has been a little less suspicious of those who refrain from meat eating at the suggestion of their doctor. Likewise, as we've learned about how meat consumption is a major contributor to climate change and other environmental problems, more and more people are a tad more accepting of green-motivated vegetarians.
What we are still not really accepting of, however, is vegetarianism as a moral choice - specifically, as a choice to avoid eating a living thing that not only had to be killed to be on a dinner table, but (unless you are eating organic meat) was also most likely tortured in the process. When you tell people you don't eat meat because you don't like killing animals, inevitably, you will be met with a look that can be described as falling somewhere between innocent surprise and irritated disgust.
The morality - the killing issue, really - is why I am a vegetarian. While I am happy that my vegetarian has positive personal health and progressive environmental implications, I have come to feel uncomfortable eating animals, especially those that are most commonly eaten: those that are mass produced, tortured and murdered by an inhumane factory farming industry.
That's exactly what goes on at most of the places where most of the meat is produced in this country. These are animal concentration camps, as any of the award-winning works of journalism about factory farming (my favorite being the classic, Fast Food Nation) have shown. For the most part, animals are treated as pure commodities, not living beings.
In a sense, this is quite strange in a country that is also one of the most loving of domestic pets like dogs and cats. Somehow, many of us make a distinction to care for Fido like part of our family, while regularly chowing down on, say, tortured baby calves penned up and starved for their artificially short lives.
But in another sense, it's quite predictable. Because we don't hear much about what factory farming really is - because we don't regularly hear and/or don't regularly want to hear about the terrible conditions for animals in these factory farms - we don't usually think of the hypocrisy. Out of sight, out of mind - and when in sight, it's angry rationalization time.
Yes, I'm sure the typical dumbshit "meat eating 'merican" has been taught to read these last few paragraphs about animal torture/murder and criticize me as a "pussy" or a "wimp" and tell me to "man up." It's the same rationalizing reaction you'll get when you tell people you aren't interested in hunting, because you don't find it all that "fun" to chase a frightened fleeing animal through the woods and blow its brains out.
That, of course, is just the broader culture talking - the Americana that says being a "red blooded" citizen of the good ol' U.S. of A means being proudly callous about killing things.
But as evidenced by the last few elections - and perhaps this one tomorrow - that culture may be changing.
Many readers here likely remember September 29th, 2008. For a brief moment, the U.S. House extended a big middle finger at Wall Street - and then, quite predictably, the entire political, media and corporate Establishment went apeshit. Though it only lasted a few days, the standoff helped further controversialize the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and thus ultimately forced the addition of some (albeit mild) restrictions on its power.
Most of us who opposed the TARP as written - and there were not many willing to take that position - were not against taking any action. We were against Congress trampling the constitution and turning the Treasury Secretary into a king, and we were against simply handing away $700 billion with no strings attached. For this, we were attacked by the Punditburo, which preposterously likened a vote for the bill as a courageous - and necessary - vote for landmark civil rights legislation (I shit you not). And for the most part, the American public has remained opposed to writing blank checks to Wall Street, especially considering the news that these kinds of bailouts have put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars.
And yet, as I show in my new newspaper column out today, the Obama administration, far from backing off or restricting TARP, is quietly moving forward a plan to create an even bigger, more permanent TARP.
I wish I could say I was surprised at this - but this is what you get when an administration packs its top-level economic positions with people connected to the same financial firms that destroyed the economy. Corruption, as we are learning, is not the exclusive domain of one party. The only question is whether or not Congress will stage another September 29th. I sure hope it does.
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In one sense, these are confusing times. Wall Street has collapsed, but the government in Washington seems more interested in using the collapse as a rationale to give Wall Street gifts, than to fix the financial system. Americans oppose the Afghanistan War, but the chattering class in Washington is desperate to continue that war. The public strongly supports a public health care option, and yet the White House has taken fifteen different positions on whether it supports such a public option. People like Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina are trumpeted in the newspapers for their "toughness" and "guts" - all while they are capitulating to every demand from corporate special interests. The list of perplexing anecdotes like this is endless.
But in another sense - the sense that the recent film In The Loop captures so well - this isn't confusing at all. As the movie shows, Washington politics is like Beverly Hills 90210, replete with catty cliques, status-obsessed narcissists, and conniving schemers. The only difference is that the Peach Pit is called The Palm, and the triumph of narcissists in DC can result in harm to millions of people, not just high school embarrassment for a few California brats.
I can't recommend this movie enough - it is one of the funniest, most incisive productions about politics I've ever seen. In my former life, I worked on Capitol Hill and in D.C.'s power circles, and so I can personally attest that the reason it is so hilarious - and dark - is because it so perfectly illustrates exactly how things work in the nation's capital. Nothing is about policy, everything is about status. Nothing is about "the American people" as politicians constantly insist, everything is about the D.C. elite.
Watch the clip above for a taste of the flick. It depicts one of the film's central characters - a walking Rahm Emanuel satire that epitomizes so many of the sycophantic freaks who infest the Beltway. Then go watch the movie - you won't regret it.
This confounding moment in American history is raising a lot of important "why" questions for us all. Here's a few that are particularly on my mind right now:
Why is the "sanctity of contracts" only an inviolable axiom when it comes to contracts that ensure Wall Street bonuses, but not union workers wages?
Why has almost nobody objected to the renomination of Ben Bernanke, the guy whose failure to better regulate banks helped destroy the economy?
Why is Rahm Emanuel so often billed as "tough" when he has spearheaded almost every single White House capitulation to corporate interests?
Why do some progressives seem to believe it is OK for progressives to criticize George W. Bush for taking a position, but not OK for progressives criticize Barack Obama for taking the same position?
Why do the same politicians who say we need to spend trillions to save the banking industry oppose spending a fraction of that to save blue collar industries?
Why does Glenn Beck rail on government spending after he publicly backed the Wall Street bailout - and actually criticized it for supposedly being too small?
Why are a tiny handful of corporate Democrats, and not the bigger number of progressives who comprise the majority of the Democratic caucus, billed as holding the all-important "balance of power" in the Senate?
Why do congressmen and senators rail on the supposed awfulness of "government run health care" for the public but never complain about the "government run health care" they enjoy?
Why has the word "reform" so often come to mean "sell out"?
Why does almost every "national" political show on every television network almost exclusively feature guests who live and work only in Washington and New York?
Why do so many political observers insist that a country should be patient during a president's first year, when history tells us that a president's first year is when change has the biggest opportunity to happen?
Why do politicians and the Beltway media pretend Democrats need 60 votes to pass a health care bill through the Senate, when the reconciliation process would allow them to pass major portions of the bill with just 51 votes?
Why do so many political activists and organizations seem to believe the only place to make change is in Washington - and specifically, in the White House - and not in state and local arenas?
Why is deficit spending only bad when it is on programs like health care that would help millions of average people, but deficit spending is perfectly fine when it is on subsidies and bailouts that help a tiny handful of very rich people?
Maybe your answer to these questions that existential question Anheuser-Busch asked us back in the late 1980s - "Why ask why?" Frankly, that might be the only answer.
